Understanding Crush Lag: What It Is and Why It Matters
Ever find yourself furiously clicking away on a website, wondering why itās taking an age to load. Thatās a classic symptom of crush lag. But while most of us simply see a slow website and frown, thereās quite a bit going on behind the scenes thatās worth unpacking. Crush lag - as it is aptly named - is when your ecommerce platform or website gets so much traffic that it slows down.
And in an age where consumers are pretty much used to lightning-fast websites and instant responses, this can be fairly problematic. There are various things that can cause crush lag. Most people donāt realise just how much heavy lifting goes into making sure an ecommerce site runs smoothly.
The thing is, when youāre running an online store, youāre not only hosting images but also managing inventory, multiple payment gateways, user data, reviews, customer queries, and so much more. When all these elements come together at the same time - especially with high levels of web traffic - things tend to slow down and sometimes crash altogether. Crush lag usually happens because of limitations in web hosting or because the backend infrastructure has bottlenecks.
This means that your website physically cannot process all the requests being made on it at once. While this might seem like something that only big ecommerce websites need to worry about, it can affect smaller stores as well. What most people donāt realise is fairly that crush lag isnāt just something that can be easily fixed by switching hosting or upgrading servers.
In many cases, your entire website architecture might need an overhaul. This isnāt just for bigger online stores but for medium sized stores as well if theyāre looking to scale up. There are some ways to solve this though - from investing in additional server space to optimising how images are displayed - but these changes have to be made at the very core of your website for them to really work well.
The Importance of Speed in Ecommerce Frameworks
Ever found yourself glaring at a spinning wheel, waiting for an online store to load. You might be surprised by how quickly we lose patience with websites that drag their feet. Thereās research suggesting that around half of shoppers will leave if a website takes more than three seconds to load. Not a long time, if you think about it.
It makes sense, though. Who wants to wait when you could be spending your money somewhere else.
The thing is, it isnāt just about losing potential customers. Slow websites can hurt a brandās reputation as well. A laggy website tends to look pretty shoddy and unreliable compared to one that works like clockwork.
And we havenāt even touched on Google rankings yet. Sites that are slow to load donāt perform well on search engines either, which means lower organic traffic.
Some things are seldom completely out of our hands ā the userās internet speed, for instance ā but thereās still plenty we can do to make things easier for the people who want what weāre selling. User experience should always be front and centre when building an e-commerce framework, and speed is one of the best ways to keep things smooth and snappy. If you want them coming back for more, providing a seamless shopping experience is the way forward. Sort of.
As far as I can tell, speed is central to customer retention in e-commerce frameworks. That first impression counts for a lot, and getting it right can mean all the difference between whether or not they decide to stick around or come back at all. It affects every aspect of your business: your sales, your reputation, and your growth as a company. The way I see it, the best websites are the ones that know how important this is and put in the work to make sure their users get nothing short of excellent service every time they visit.
Tactic 1: Optimizing Your Website's Load Time
I Believe ever wondered why some online shops load in a blink and others lag till youāve almost lost the will to live. Thereās a science to it, but also a bit of art. The most immediate thing your customers notice - even before your product selection or cheeky pop-up deals - is how quickly your site loads. A slow site is like standing behind someone counting coins at the checkout.
You know theyāre about to pay, but all you want to do is leave. A surprising number of people still donāt see page speed as top-of-mind. They get caught up with how the website looks and feels and forget that it has to be experienced first.
Not many will hang around if thereās more lag than page-load. Optimising for speed isnāt just about making things move fast, though. Itās about balancing form and function so that your homepage, the cart, every category and every image loads fast enough for most people not to notice.
There are tons of tiny tweaks that can be made if you know what youāre looking for. I find that using lighter weight themes (no bells and whistles), going easy on plugins (they really pile on) and compressing images (so important. ) is already half the work done right there. Content Delivery Networks or CDNs can presumably make a marked difference by storing copies of your content on multiple servers across locations for more stable delivery.
All ecommerce frameworks are optimised differently so it takes a little trial-and-error to find what works for yours specifically, but getting it right is worth every minute spent tinkering around with load times. Even if you have found what works, load time isnāt set-and-forget - routine site audits can help pick up any bits dragging your speeds down so you can fix them before shoppers drop off faster than your pages are loading.
Tactic 2: Streamlining Your Checkout Process
Have you ever left an online store with a shopping cart full of stuff, and then totally bailed. I know I have, and it turns out - so have most people. The checkout process is a major make-or-break moment in every shopping journey, no matter what you're selling.
Clunky forms, hidden costs, endless logins and dozens of irrelevant questions can kill an entire sale in seconds. More or less. Speed really is relatively the name of the game for online stores, but especially so when we look at checkout processes. Think about how you feel as a shopper - after youāve already chosen what you want to buy, do you really want to fill out a ton of fields.
I sort of lose my patience within minutes if someone asks me to make an account or verify my phone number 3 times during checkout. And thatās probably true for most people out there, too. When the payment process is slow or filled with unnecessary hurdles, customers will drop off before they finish buying. Seems like the easiest way to solve this would be by cutting down on all the friction and just getting right to payment.
Only ask for information that is absolutely required for the order - even signups should ideally be optional so your new customer can just get on with their day and pay as soon as possible. Some sites donāt even require an email address now - those are usually customer centric stores that let the customer choose whether or not they want to save their details or add something to the guest cart. There are other ways to speed up checkout experiences too.
Apple Pay and Google Pay integrations work wonders because they allow most mobile users to check out instantly without having to type in anything except their passwords. But they can be quite expensive for the store itself - both Apple Pay and Google Pay charge merchant fees for each transaction. The other option is autofill - just pre-fill forms with returning user data using a login prompt (if enabled), so your shoppers donāt have to enter their details every single time they buy something from your store again.
Tactic 3: Leveraging Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
Ever wondered why your favourite streaming services rarely keep you waiting to get the show started, even at peak hours. It has something to do with those three mysterious letters ā CDN, or Content Delivery Network. Honestly, theyāre not as scary as they sound. I like to think of them as the food couriers of the internet ā responsible for serving you piping hot lasagna, or in this case, digital content.
CDNs serve up data efficiently by caching content at many āedgeā locations all over the globe. How does that help an online business that just wants to sell great soap. For one, when an e-commerce site uses a CDN, things like product images and videos load instantly, even in Mumbai on 1G internet.
Not only does that eliminate lag time for shoppers on the other side of the world ā resulting in happier customers and more stuff sold ā it also frees up precious time for site creators who now get to focus on what theyāre good at: designing pretty websites. So rather than hosting all your content on a single server, itās cached and spread out over a network of servers ā something akin to how money is distributed between several banks. More importantly, it helps keep your site afloat when thereās a sudden spike in traffic. Sort of.
And it takes care of security risks too ā CDN providers have some fairly robust systems in place that protect sites from DDoS attacks (no idea what that stands for but we donāt want them either). Surely there are more reasons why content delivery networks are valuable but if thereās one thing we can take away from this discussion ā CDNs are like spiderwebs that catch data so businesses donāt have to scramble every time their site starts lagging.
Tactic 4: Implementing Lazy Loading Techniques
Do you remember the first time you realised your favourite website has images or videos that load only when you scroll to them. That sort of magic is called Lazy Loading, and it's probably one of the best things to happen to the internet since sliced bread (and sliced bread, for what itās worth, is rather overrated). I think lazy loading is one of the most useful techniques out there.
Why load all images at once, when only a few are visible in your field of view. Lazy loading allows you to serve up the content above the fold fast. Then as your user scrolls down and needs more images, scripts, or elements, theyāre loaded incrementally.
This approach ensures that only elements that have a high priority for display are occasionally delivered immediately. The others are loaded gradually as and when required. Lazy loading also helps reduce network bandwidth and memory consumption by optimising image delivery.
There are so many ways of implementing lazy loading depending on what kind of element needs to be loaded. For example, for images, use img tag attributes like lazyload or low res version of images with low quality image placeholder (LQIP) attribute. For background images, JavaScript can be used for lazy loading on scroll event listeners.
For videos, avoid using auto preload attribute and display thumbnails until users click play. If it were up to me, Iād have everything on the internet load only when I need it. While there may be some limits to how much you can implement lazy loading on your ecommerce website - especially if you sell a product that relies heavily on beautiful photography or video - itās still worth considering this as a performance improvement technique because it does make quite a difference in overall experience if implemented well.